Source standards
How Snippet Votes tiers every source, why some domains are excluded, and a public changelog of every edit to the source registry. Non-partisanship does not come from having the right list. Every list is contestable. It comes from publishing the list, the criteria behind it, and every change made to it.
Primary documents win
Any claim about what a law, budget, vote, filing, or ruling says must cite the record itself. Journalism corroborates the record; it does not replace it.
Exclusion is about verifiability, not viewpoint
A source is excluded because its claims cannot be checked or because it is advocacy presented as record - not because of where it sits politically. Advocacy from every direction is treated the same way.
Every citation shows its work
Each source in a briefing expands to show the excerpt used, the tier and institution class, how much of the body text it supports, and why it qualified.
The list is public and challengeable
The registry, the tier of every domain, the stated reason, and the date of the most recent edit are all published on this page.
Tier criteria
Tier 1 - primary authority
The publisher is the primary record-holder or is subject to formal review: government and court records, state and local legislatures, election authorities, international bodies, peer-reviewed journals, and established academic research centers.
Tier 2 - independent reporting
The publisher is independent, has a masthead, named bylines, and a public corrections policy. This covers public-service wires, investigative newsrooms, nonprofit statehouse outlets, and public-media stations. Used for context and corroboration, not as the only support for a factual claim.
Tier 3 - contextual only
Commercial or industry research with a business interest in its own findings. Cited sparingly and only alongside a stronger source.
Excluded source
The domain is user-editable, unattributed, opinion-first, or otherwise cannot be verified as a record of what happened.
Unclassified source
The domain is not yet in the registry. Snippet Votes runs a strict allowlist, so unknown domains are rejected and queued for review rather than cited.
What we exclude, and why
Each exclusion below is a rule about verifiability that applies identically regardless of the political direction of the source.
User-editable and open-submission sites
Wikipedia, Medium, Substack, Quora
Anyone can change the text after we cite it, so the citation cannot be verified later. We follow these pages to their underlying sources instead.
Social platforms and forums
X, Facebook, Reddit, TikTok, YouTube comments
No editorial accountability and no stable record. Official statements posted there are cited from the agency or campaign's own site or filing.
Party, campaign, and PAC sites
Party committees, candidate campaign pages, PAC advocacy pages
These are advocacy by definition. Their claims may be quoted as attributed positions, never as a bare statement of fact.
Opinion, editorial, and commentary pages
Op-eds, columns, editorial boards, think-tank commentary
Opinion is an argument about the facts, not a record of them. Where the argument itself matters, it is quoted with attribution.
AI-generated summary and content-farm sites
Aggregators that rewrite other outlets without reporting
They introduce a copy of a copy, with no way to check what was changed in the retelling.
Hard-paywalled articles
Subscriber-only reporting with no readable version
A citation the reader cannot open cannot be checked. Where an open primary document covers the same claim, we cite that instead.
Registry changelog
The 60 most recently added or edited entries in the live source registry, newest first.
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